From: "Keith F. Lynch" <kfl at KeithLynch.net>
To: WSFA members <WSFAlist at KeithLynch.net>
Subject: [WSFA] Introducing UAvicoin
Date: Fri,  1 Apr 2022 14:51:25 -0400 (EDT)

Lots of people complain about Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies
on the grounds that they waste a tremendous amount of energy.
To a rough first approximation, the way Bitcoins are mined is
by rewarding whoever, in each ten-minute span, wastes the most
electricity repeatedly computing the SHA-256 function.  According
to https://www.blockchain.com/charts/hash-rate miners are currently
averaging 2E+20 such computations per second, about a mole of
computations per hour.  As such, the vast majority of computations
ever done consist of SHA-256 hashes.

(At least by our species.  Though it has been suggested that this
is the explanation of the Fermi paradox.  Every species eventually
consumes all available energy mining cryptocurrencies, leaving none
to spare for interstellar exploration or communication.)

My modest proposal is to instead reward a more useful form of
destruction.  So I hereby introduce UAvicoin, short for Ukraine
victory coin.  Mining consists of destroying Russian military assets
in Ukraine.  Whoever destroys the most during each ten-minute span
will be rewarded with one UAvicoin.  Each act of destruction must be
documented on a smartphone, tagged with current time, date, latitude,
and longitude.  That's to prevent cheating.  For instance destruction
of Russian military assets in Russia is disallowed, since it would be
likely to cause World War III.

For purposes of this mining, the borders of Ukraine are construed
broadly, to include Crimea and all other places controlled by Ukraine
at any time in the 21st century.

This coin will be very valuable, since none will be mined after
Russia's withdrawal from Ukraine, which, due to this mining, will
be very soon.